Thanks for stopping by. You'll find some reviews of books I've read. I love to read mysteries and thrillers. Favorites include James Lee Burke and Louise Penny. I love discovering new authors. New cookbooks are another favorite. I also review women's fiction, historical fiction and Christian fiction and non-fiction. Follow me on twitter: @PoCoKat. Happy reading my friends!

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Review: Beartown by Fredrik Backman

Format: Kindle Edition

File Size: 4123 KB

Print Length: 432 pages

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 25 2017)

Sold by: Simon & Schuster Canada, Inc.

Language: English

ASIN: B01LLXCGWY

Book Description

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove returns with a dazzling, profound novel about a small town with a big dream—and the price required to make it come true.

People
say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest,
it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by
the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working
men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in
Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice
hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they
actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place
now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being
responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the
semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a
young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and,
like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no
resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a
small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the
courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this
story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire
world.

"Like Friday Night Lights, this is about more than youth sports;
it's part coming-of-age novel, part study of moral failure, and finally a
chronicle of groupthink in which an unlikely hero steps forward to save
more than one person from self-destruction. A thoroughly empathetic
examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman's latest will resonate a
long time." (Kirkus Reviews)

"Backman, a bestseller-list
mainstay...returns with the story of a down-and-out town and its hopeful
young hockey team...The sentimentally savvy Backman takes a sobering
and solemn look at the ways alienation and acceptance, ethics and
emotions nearly destroy a small town and young people." (Booklist)

1

Late one evening toward the end of
March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the
forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

* * *

This is the story of how we got there.|Beartown

2

Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.

It’s
a Friday in early March in Beartown and nothing has happened yet.
Everyone is waiting. Tomorrow, the Beartown Ice Hockey Club’s junior
team is playing in the semifinal of the biggest youth tournament in the
country. How important can something like that be? In most places, not
so important, of course. But Beartown isn’t most places.

Bang. Bang. Bang-bang-bang.

The
town wakes early, like it does every day; small towns need a head start
if they’re going to have any chance in the world. The rows of cars in
the parking lot outside the factory are already covered with snow;
people are standing in silent lines with their eyes half-open and their
minds half-closed, waiting for their electronic punch cards to verify
their existence to the clocking-in machine. They stamp the slush off
their boots with autopilot eyes and answering-machine voices while they
wait for their drug of choice—caffeine or nicotine or sugar—to kick in
and render their bodies at least tolerably functional until the first
break.

Out on the road the commuters set off for bigger towns
beyond the forest; their gloves slam against heating vents and their
curses are the sort you only think of uttering when you’re drunk, dying,
or sitting in a far-too-cold Peugeot far too early in the morning.

* * *

If they keep quiet they can hear it in the distance: Bang-bang-bang. Bang. Bang.

* * *

Maya
wakes up and stays in bed, playing her guitar. The walls of her room
are covered in a mixture of pencil drawings and tickets she’s saved from
concerts she’s been to in cities far from here. Nowhere near as many as
she would have liked, but considerably more than her parents actually
consented to. She loves everything about her guitar—its weight against
her body, the way the wood responds when her fingertips tap it, the
strings that cut hard against her skin. The simple notes, the gentle
riffs—it’s all a wonderful game to her. She’s fifteen years old and has
already fallen in love many times, but her guitar will always be her
first love. It’s helped her to put up with living in this town, to deal
with being the daughter of the general manager of an ice hockey team in
the forest.

She hates hockey but understands her father’s love
for it; the sport is just a different instrument from hers. Her mom
sometimes whispers in her daughter’s ear: “Never trust people who don’t
have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.” Her mom
loves a man who loves a place that loves a game. This is a hockey town,
and there are plenty of things you can say about those, but at least
they’re predictable. You know what to expect if you live here. Day after
day after day.

Bang.

Beartown isn’t close to anything.
Even on a map the place looks unnatural. “As if a drunk giant tried to
piss his name in the snow,” some might say. “As if nature and man were
fighting a tug-of-war for space,” more high-minded souls might suggest.
Either way, the town is losing. It has been a very long time since it
won at anything. More jobs disappear each year, and with them the
people, and the forest devours one or two more abandoned houses each
season. Back in the days when there were still things to boast about,
the city council erected a sign beside the road at the entrance to the
town with the sort of slogan that was popular at the time:
“Beartown—Leaves You Wanting More!” The wind and snow took a few years
to wipe out the word “More.” Sometimes the entire community feels like a
philosophical experiment: If a town falls in the forest but no one
hears it, does it matter at all?

To answer that question you
need to walk a few hundred yards down toward the lake. The building you
see there doesn’t look like much, but it’s an ice rink, built by factory
workers four generations ago, men who worked six days a week and needed
something to look forward to on the seventh. All the love this town
could thaw out was passed down and still seems to end up devoted to the
game: ice and boards, red and blue lines, sticks and pucks and every
ounce of determination and power in young bodies hurtling at full speed
into the corners in the hunt for those pucks. The stands are packed
every weekend, year after year, even though the team’s achievements have
collapsed in line with the town’s economy. And perhaps that’s
why—because everyone hopes that when the team’s fortunes improve again,
the rest of the town will get pulled up with it.

Which is why
places like this always have to pin their hopes for the future on young
people. They’re the only ones who don’t remember that things actually
used to be better. That can be a blessing. So they’ve coached their
junior team with the same values their forebears used to construct their
community: work hard, take the knocks, don’t complain, keep your mouth
shut, and show the bastards in the big cities where we’re from. There’s
not much worthy of note around here. But anyone who’s been here knows
that it’s a hockey town.

Bang.

Amat will soon turn
sixteen. His room is so tiny that if it had been in a larger apartment
in a well-to-do neighborhood in a big city, it would barely have
registered as a closet. The walls are completely covered with posters of
NHL players, with two exceptions. One is a photograph of himself aged
seven, wearing gloves that are too big for him and with his helmet
halfway down his forehead, the smallest of all the boys on the ice. The
other is a sheet of white paper on which his mother has written parts of
a prayer. When Amat was born, she lay with him on her chest in a narrow
bed in a little hospital on the other side of the planet, no one but
them in the whole world. A nurse had whispered the prayer in his
mother’s ear back then—it is said to have been written on the wall above
Mother Teresa’s bed—and the nurse hoped it would give the solitary
woman strength and hope. Almost sixteen years later, the scrap of paper
is still hanging on her son’s wall, the words mixed up, but she wrote
them down as well as she could remember them:

If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway.

All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Amat
sleeps with his skates by his bed every night. “Must have been one hell
of a birth for your poor mother, you being born with those on,” the
caretaker at the rink often jokes. He’s offered to let the boy keep them
in a locker in the team’s storeroom, but Amat likes carrying them there
and back. Wants to keep them close.

Amat has never been as tall
as the other players, has never been as muscular as them, has never
shot as hard. But no one in the town can catch him. No one on any team
he’s encountered so far has been as fast as him. He can’t explain it; he
assumes it’s a bit like when people look at a violin and some of them
just see a load of wood and screws where others see music. Skates have
never felt odd to him. On the contrary, when he sticks his feet in a
pair of normal shoes he feels like a sailor stepping ashore.

The final lines his mother wrote on the sheet of paper on his wall read as follows:

What
you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it
is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.

Immediately below that, written in red crayon in the determined handwriting of a primary school student, it says:

They say Im to little to play. Become good player any way!

Bang.

Once
upon a time, Beartown Ice Hockey’s A-team—one step above the
juniors—was second-best in the top division in the country. That was
more than two decades and three divisions ago, but tomorrow Beartown
will be playing against the best once more. So how important can a
junior game be? How much can a town care about the semifinal a bunch of
teenagers are playing in a minor-league tournament? Not so much, of
course. If it weren’t this particular dot on the map.

A couple
of hundred yards south of the road sign lies “the Heights,” a small
cluster of expensive houses with views across the lake. The people who
live in them own supermarkets, run factories, or commute to better jobs
in bigger towns where their colleagues at staff parties wonder,
wide-eyed: “Beartown? How can you possibly live that far out in the
forest?” They reply something about hunting and fishing, proximity to
nature, but these days almost everyone is asking themselves if it is
actually possible. Living here any longer. Asking themselves if there’s
anything left, apart from property values that seem to fall as rapidly
as the temperature.

* * *

Then they wake up to the sound of a bang. And they smile.

About the Author

Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, as well as a novella, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer.
His books are published in more than thirty-five countries. He lives in
Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. His new novel, Beartown, will be published in April 2017.

My Review

“All adults have days when we feel completely
drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time
fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we
wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful
thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without
breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly
how many.”
―
Fredrik Backman,
Beartown

Beartown is the best book that I have read in 2017. You must read this book. It is brilliant.

Beartown is a story about hockey. And small towns. And the people in small towns. But it is so much more than that. Beartown is filled with characters but as a reader you will have not problem telling them apart.

Fredrik Bachman is a brilliant story-teller. I have only recently discovered his books. I cannot help thinking about what he writes over and over again. Beartown is a coming of age tale that could happen anywhere. The tale is set in Sweden but it could easily be a small town in Canada or the US.

I could not put down Beartown. It will be the next book my husband reads. I don't often recommend books to him but Beartown is a must read.

Highest recommendation for Beartown. I cannot wait for Fredrik Bachman's next book.

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